The secret is to walk evading nothing

Nick Laird applauds the wit, inventiveness and maturity of four collections.

Nick Laird

12:01AM GMT 13 Nov 2005

The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark Haddon [96pp, Picador, £12.99]

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy [100pp, Picador, £12.99]

Woods etc. by Alice Oswald [64pp, Faber & Faber, £12.99]

The Forward Book of Poetry 2006 [148pp, Faber & Faber, £8.99 (pbk)]

Mark Haddon's debut poetry collection exhibits the same inventiveness and humanity displayed in his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Here, Haddon tries various forms and tones on for size: there are postmodern skits, a witty prose poem called "This Poem is Certificate 18", a lullaby, monologues from a cat and a dog, a long, weird, not entirely successful "decimation" of John Buchan's novel, The House of the Four Winds, several strong, resonant lyrics, and some fine versions of Horace's Odes, revivified with modern idioms. Horace, with his obsessional interest in the changes brought about by time, is a good fit for Haddon, whose own lyrics deal tenderly with death and longing, particularly in "Silver Nitrate" and "Once Upon a Time":

…everybody wants to slip their flesh off like a winter coat and enter this familiar room that smells of gas and beeswax…

Haddon shares with Louis MacNeice an interest in the Freudian, sinister side of the nursery rhyme: as he puts it in "The Seventh Circle", the "little tracks / that promise daybreak by the sea… curve, always / back to that long night in the nursery". There are other influences on display here too, and not all of them seem fully absorbed, from the Larkin of "Ambulances" (in "Cabin Doors to Automatic" Haddon writes of "the hope that distance / brings the solving wonder / of one last clear view") to the postmodern knowingness and direct address of Haddon's own editor Don Paterson (the first poem here opens "Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury…"), but these are small complaints when put beside the strengths of a collection so unusually funny, frank and wry, and so restlessly engaged with examining the received narratives of life. As Haddon writes in "The Facts",

The ugly sisters were neither sisters nor, indeed, women, nor were they remotely interested in the prince.

Carol Ann Duffy's collection, Rapture, also owes something to fairy tales. Its red-ribbon bookmark and sumptuous cover, a silver-gilt scene depicting some of the book's subject matter - a heron, shooting stars, a woman with arms outstretched to a crescent moon - suggest it could be an old children's book, and Duffy is not afraid to use techniques familiar from nursery rhymes and ballads: repetitions, choruses, full rhymes.

But these are adult poems, tracking the trajectory of a love affair through infatuation, love, domesticity and bliss to abasement, arguments, and a break-up. The final poem has an epigraph from Browning, about the "wise thrush" that "sings each song twice over" to "recapture / The first fine careless rapture!" and the book ends with the admission that the poems are a way of reliving events, "a gift, the blush of memory".

The danger in Rapture is that the singularity of the subject matter could become relentless, and this danger is heightened by Duffy's recurrent use of certain images: stone, moon, charm, star, heart, gift, trees, bones. But actually, contrarily, the book works cumulatively, and the poems take on the strange power of charms, spells, incantations. In the hands of a lesser technician, the self-imposed limits on the language might mean tedium, but Duffy makes each poem sing an intricate, delicate song. She is also aware of the difficulties in trying to make the oldest emotion fresh: she finds "the words at the back of a drawer", and

rubbed at them till they gleamed in my palm - I love you, I love you, I love you - as though they were new.

In "The Love Poem", Duffy lifts lines from Barrett Browning, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Sidney, Campion, Donne, the Song of Solomon and Shelley, and this awareness of the love poem's heritage allows Duffy to make new ones. Many of the individual poems here stand easily beside the best of her writing. There are brilliant parables like "Give", the domestic snapshots of "Tea" and "Chinatown", or the eerie chant of "Betrothal", which marries Thanatos to Eros, and owes as much to Myra Hindley as Philip Sidney. There is an exceptional fluidity and grace about these poems and, using only the simplest language, Duffy can still spring a verse on the reader that is startling:

If I was dead, and my bones adrift like dropped oars in the deep, turning earth…

Woods etc., Alice Oswald's third collection, is as taken as Duffy by natural, elemental symbols: the moon, stone, stars, trees. But unlike Duffy, who uses the symbols self-reflexively, to plot her own purposes, Oswald is concerned with what these things might be able to tell us about the world: "If you stop rustling about you can hear / Whatever the wind says when there's no one there." Oswald nods to other poets, notably Hughes, Plath and Heaney, though there are also older antecedents here. Her sonnet "Another Westminster Bridge" reads like an ironic, saddened comment on Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" ("Earth has not anything to show more fair…").

In Oswald the scene is dampening, imprisoning, where the weather trespasses into strip-lit offices through tiny windows into tiny thoughts and authorities and the soft beseeching tapping of typewriters…

The slight archaism of this (word-processors, surely?) could be seen as symptomatic of the kind of subject matter Oswald addresses. Her vision is nature-based, either micro (a leaf is focused on until it becomes "cells and pores and water-rods") or macro (concerned with cyclical history). In "Another Westminster Bridge", she goes on to talk of "the teetering structures of administration", and her description of the water flowing under the bridge as a "scrapwork of flashes and glittery flutters / and regular waves of apparently motionless motion", applies equally to the city itself, to civilisation, seemingly permanent but actually rising and falling away. Belief in the cycle of history, oblique here, suffuses the book; the one constant is nature.

Though it partly lacks the easier charms and immediacy of Dart, the seriousness of the undertaking in this collection can only be admired: poem after poem goes worrying after the essence of things. Again and again the physics of Woods gives way to the metaphysics of etc. Oswald is our closest reader of the natural world, who tries to hear "the cracking / bushtwigs break their secrecies": as a poet, it seems, her own "secret is to walk evading nothing".

Oswald, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best collection, features in The Forward Book of Poetry 2006. As a litmus test for what is being currently written in poetry in the British Isles, the Forward books are hard to beat. There are two poems each from the five poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the Prize for Best First Collection. There are the five poems shortlisted for the Prize for the Best Single Poem, and 54 highly commended poems drawn from poetry magazines, literary journals and collections.

Like any anthology, it's uneven, but there are fine pieces here, including the formal excursions of a villanelle by Sinead Morrissey and a sestina by Glyn Maxwell. There is also a wonderful poem by Stephen Knight called "99 Poems", which takes 99 apparently unrelated lines, arranges them alphabetically and becomes something elegiac and heartbreaking. You'll have to read it to see what I mean.